The 14 kids of the Hager family, c. 1957
This is a photo of my Grandpa and Grandma Hager and their 14 kids, taken around 1957. Dad is second from left in the front; he’s about 13 years old.
Grandma gave birth to 16 children. Two girls died as babies in the span of a couple of months in 1933 from whooping cough. More of that story is featured in my memoir. It’s hard for me to imagine the grief that overtook my grandparents after the loss of those girls.
I only knew Grandma Hager; Grandpa Hager died when I was a year old, in 1975. What I best remember about Grandma is the joy and love she exuded and passed down to her children and grandchildren. Whatever grief she felt at the loss of her children (she also would outlive three adult sons, including my dad), she found a way to cope. As best as I can tell, she relied upon her strong Catholic faith in times of darkness. For that, I admire her greatly.
Grandma died in 1996 at the age of 89.
If You Have Five Seconds to Spare 
That’s a gorgeous photo. Your grandma is glowing.
My Dad comes from a family of 8 kids. There were losses, too – one in a tiny little grave in the cemetery at Marysburg church. I think often on the different ways different generations have dealt with hardship, love and loss.
I think of this, too, as I’m reading WILD. Strayed’s experience with grief was just so different from anything I felt myself or had witnessed. Do you think we live in a society now where we have the “luxury” to fall apart with grief?
My grandma had her own breaking point, sobbing and wailing in the hospital when her first baby died. A nurse slapped her and basically said, “Get a hold of yourself. You have a family at home to take care of.”
Oh wow. Slapped her? Those were different times, weren’t they? Yes, I do think this generation does have a certain permission if not luxury to delve into grief in a way that previous generations didn’t.
Families sure were bigger back then. My mom’s had ten kids. And loses were more common. How they went on does astound me, I have suffered so little loss by comparison. Funny you mention WiLD. Strayed’s falling apart was the hardest part for me to accept. In part it seemed to me it was part of her young writer’s journey: she needed to get free of her husband, or felt she did, and needed adventure. I do think she was uncommonly fixated on her mother, as she shows, but it just made me wonder if she really did love her husband as much as she claimed. Her mother’s death seemed to give her, in part, an excuse for derangement and estrangement.
Richard, I am almost done with WILD and plan to blog about some of the ideas I had while reading it. One thing I plan to mention is that like Strayed, I got married at 19. But the difference is my grief surrounding not only my dad’s death when I was 15 but also, like Strayed, a grief for the loss of the family unit was part of the reason I desired to get married. My husband’s family was a replication of what my own had been in many ways. I can see where Strayed’s husband reminded her of the times when she had a strong family unit, and maybe those memories were too hard to bear. The grief, coupled with her young age, made her a different person. Grief drove her to solitude, while it pushed me to be a part of something again.